Waiting for Fırat

Abstract

Summary This short story explores the struggle to translate both experience and language. Based on research I conducted in İstanbul in 2015, this work of ethnographic fiction examines the production and reproduction of memories of the Gezi Park Protests, in the form of narrative and bodily experience. The narrative builds on the juxtaposition of clean and filthy that is introduced by one of the narrator’s interlocutors as he recounts his experience of police violence during the protests. The narrator seeks to understand how a blow first described as “clean” is only sentences later rendered “filthy,” and how to translate it. This linguistic exploration also becomes a corporeal one: the narrator navigates the dichotomy of clean and filthy through her own bodily experiences conducting fieldwork. This becomes one way in which she accesses the feminist underpinnings of the protests, which her interlocutors understood in terms of resistance to the encroachment of the state into women’s intimate lives. Shared corporeal experiences provide a path toward a translation that at the same time allows the narrator to confront the very incommensurability of supposedly shared experiences.

A Tapestry of Edgelands: Defining Carceral Edgeland(s) in Masafer Yatta (Firing Zone 918)

“…Embodiment has been unpacked in a variety of conflict contexts: embodiment as memory work (Conway, 2007; Frankel, 2019; Ribeiro de Menezes, 2014), embodiment and conflict trauma (Gobodo‐Madikizela, 2020; Koureas, 2008), the gendered dimensions of embodiment (Fisher, 2011; Inkle, 2014), and how embodiment unfolds under the occupation (Bishara, 2015; Cooperman, 2021; Sasson‐Levy and Rapoport, 2003; Shalhoub‐Kevorkian, 2017). In the case of embodiment under occupation, Rema Hammami considers a neglected aspect of the occupation: moving away from the regular analyses of the spatial dimensions of the conflict and Israel's technological advances, she suggests that we look at “the embodied dirty work at its core” (2019, p. 87).…”